......."The response has been a gathering French outrage. I interviewed Strauss-Kahn long ago. He struck me as charming and very smart. Most impressive to me was that he seemed determined to modernize French socialism, a process too long delayed with the result that the French Socialist Party is a European dinosaur.

None of this, however, has anything to do with whether he attempted rape and forcibly imprisoned a 32-year-old chambermaid. Nor, of course, does his distinguished stewardship of the International Monetary Fund. The talent of Strauss-Kahn, 62, is not the issue.

Yet his French cohorts — men just as charming and smart as Strauss-Kahn — have made it their business to say, in essence, that he could not have done what he is accused of doing because he is one of us. He is, in effect, innocent by association"......

Oh, s’il vous please!

....."Perhaps Lévy’s defense was the most extraordinary, for its cavalier dismissal of the African woman at the heart of the drama when African victims have been a focus of his various campaigns, but even more so for its language on Strauss-Kahn: “Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally; but this brutal and violent individual, this wild animal, this primate, obviously no, it’s absurd.”

And here we are. There are plenty of facts, incidents and complaints — never fully investigated by the French press — to suggest that the serious charges against Strauss-Kahn are not “absurd” and that a young African woman’s voice raised against violent abuse by the powerful should have its day in court.

Bin Laden is dead. The Jews went to work. Suite 2806 is just a number".